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Wargames!

Posts

have the Close Combat games gotten any love in this thread? i feel like one of the "new" (different dev i believe) ones was mentioned. i think CC4 was the first one i played. it was probably the first real-time game i played that didn't let you pause and issue orders, making for some intense moments. i'll probably have to dig up my copies of this soon.

this thread and some other strategy threads have had me on a wargame kick. silent hunter 3 has been getting a lot of PC time and Panzer Tactics on the DS brings back great memories of the Panzer General stuff.

edit: i checked out that Harpoon game on the web and it looks insanely deep. has anyone tried those modern subsim games? i never was too interested as the instrumentation used seemed way too complex. but for the simulationist i can see it being rad.

That English navy defends its homeland against landing flotallias something fierce D:.

In my Panzer-divisions-conquer-the-world game as Germany I couldn't get anywhere near their beaches. I wound up going over them. I invaded a lightly defended coastal region with a port but no beaches up in Scotland, had my transports sail right in and unload about 20 Panzer divisions before the British knew what hit them.

man Theatre of War (first one) seems like it would be awesome, too bad it runs slow as balls. must be bad optimization or something cause the graphics aren't that amazing and it doesn't seem to be rendering that huge of an environment. i'll try lowering the resolution, but i hate gaming in non native res.

I loved the Close Combat series. No building, but it required careful management of your troops. The fog of war and scouting were essential, which made for tense online games. And there was a good variety of units and maps, which was enhanced by an active modding community.

It's just a shame that the AI never seemed to improve. Bazooka times that never fire their weapons, making PIAT teams far more useful despite their more dated weaponry. Tanks with inebriated drivers, incapable of moving in anything resembling a straight line, and gunners who target infantry even when presented with a clear broadside shot at a Panther tank at close range. AI that rushes the player suicidally even on maps it is supposed to be defending.

Unfortunately, right about the time we should have gotten a refined, nearly perfected Close Combat game, the whole genre shifted to first-generation 3D wargames that looked and/or played like ass.

Zoku Gojira on January 2009

"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
PSN: ZokuGojira

besides computer wargaming i LOVE some tabletop action. i'm real stoked on this game Conflict of Heroes which is a tactical bg based on the eastern front of ww2. the people that published that (Academy Games) are also putting out Sturm Europa! which i thought some of you may be interested in.. cause it looks like Hearts of Iron: The Board Game. real excited to see how it turns out

Anyone else ever play Civil War Generals 2? Because that's an awesome game.

I have Europa Universalis II around here somewhere, but when I tried to play it before I could not figure out what I was supposed to be doing like at all. I think I was Ukraine or something like that and I pretty much spread out over all of Europe and conquered some barabarian states or something and... basically ran out of things to do. I also could not figure out if there was a way to cross water.

I love the Civil War Generals games. The first one, Robert E. Lee, is what got me into the genre, and it what I used (before Advance Wars) to try to bring other people in since it's so accessible. The last thing you want to start out with is some brain-breaker like War in the Pacific (the entire WWII PTO played out in 1-day turns, yikes).

If you are already playing Hearts of Iron II, I suggest you download the World In Flames mod. Really improves the experience. More accurate historical conditions, better combat resolution, and most importantly, a more interesting and varied AI. This is by far it's best feature. You will see a general increase in AI intelligence so it's harder to encircle provinces and form pockets, and you will also start seeing it planning large scale operations in the scale of an Operation Overlord or Downfall.

Empires Total War looks interesting. It may be open enough that I will have the time to play and really get into. I love games like Hearts of Iron and board games like Axis and Allies, but the time commitment to even get into a game of either was always to high for me ever since I left the life of a student behind.

I've been looking forward to War Leaders: Clash of Nations. It's basically exactly like Total War, about as easy to play, too, except it's set in World War 2. I've never been able to get into Paradox Interactive-like games because I've found them to be so drab to look at it and a statistic nightmare. Total War games have always been fairly easy to play and still have a lot of depth, so that's one reason why I can't wait to play War Leaders. It sounds like it has that balance.

It's also very pretty and apparently includes campaign multiplayer for up to seven players. It comes out next month in the UK, no word on if it's coming to the US, so I might have to import it.

If you are already playing Hearts of Iron II, I suggest you download the World In Flames mod. Really improves the experience. More accurate historical conditions, better combat resolution, and most importantly, a more interesting and varied AI. This is by far it's best feature. You will see a general increase in AI intelligence so it's harder to encircle provinces and form pockets, and you will also start seeing it planning large scale operations in the scale of an Operation Overlord or Downfall.

I've been looking forward to War Leaders: Clash of Nations. It's basically exactly like Total War, about as easy to play, too, except it's set in World War 2. I've never been able to get into Paradox Interactive-like games because I've found them to be so drab to look at it and a statistic nightmare. Total War games have always been fairly easy to play and still have a lot of depth, so that's one reason why I can't wait to play War Leaders. It sounds like it has that balance.

It's also very pretty and apparently includes campaign multiplayer for up to seven players. It comes out next month in the UK, no word on if it's coming to the US, so I might have to import it.

Screenshots:

hmm, i could definitely be into this. pretty much anything ww2 inspired i'm all about.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think I remember WL:CoN get some very bad reviews over here...something about the AI being braindead.

I heard it was really buggy on release, but they quickly released like three or four large patches which apparently fixed most of the issues. They have English patch notes for some reason, and AI and general difficulty was mentioned as being improved. If we have any forumers from regions that have it, I'd love to read some impressions.

I've been looking forward to War Leaders: Clash of Nations. It's basically exactly like Total War, about as easy to play, too, except it's set in World War 2. I've never been able to get into Paradox Interactive-like games because I've found them to be so drab to look at it and a statistic nightmare. Total War games have always been fairly easy to play and still have a lot of depth, so that's one reason why I can't wait to play War Leaders. It sounds like it has that balance.

It's also very pretty and apparently includes campaign multiplayer for up to seven players. It comes out next month in the UK, no word on if it's coming to the US, so I might have to import it.

Screenshots:

Whoa! What now? What is this?

How big are the battle maps?

Must research!

Actually you know what this reminds me of over Total War is that Axis and Allies abortion of a game where you did RTS fights for the territoreis.

Okay, so still playing the 1936 campaign in Hearts of Iron 2, determined to fend off the Germans as France before moving onto another campaign! The best way seems to be to extend the Maginot Line to the Atlantic, and that's what the Internet seems to say, too. But how can anyone do this? Building land forts takes too much time and by the time the Wehrmacht advances I've only managed to get the line up to a strength of three in Lille, Dunkerque and Reims. It's not possible, I tell you!

Rohan on January 2009

...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.

I haven't played France, but have you looked at your ministers? Particularly your Chief of the Army? You might want to sack your current one for a Land Fortifications and Attrition specialist, if you have one. The Land Fortification specialist makes build speeds on land forts faster and makes them require less IC on building I think, while Attrition raises the defensive bonus of land forts and increases the defensive bonus of dug-in troops, while also increasing organization across the line.

The Hearts of Iron III demo gets released today (in about an hour). The manual is available here as well, and the game comes out Friday I believe. I haven't looked too deep into what they've added, but it looks fucking massive. Over 10,000 territories now I think.

Oh shit, thats awesome. 39.99 and you get both HoI2 and HoI3 (I always forget to check Steam for these games)? Great deal - too bad I already have all the other games. Playing Paradox games is always a huge undertaking, but I think I'm going to jump head first into this one.

Been going through the demo and holy shit is it nasty advanced. There's an option for the AI to take over various things like research, production, politics etc but where's the fun in that eh? I don't normally do tutorials but I'm making an effort here, it helps that the guy in the help text is hitler and he's apparently painting at the same time

Okay first impressions on the demo now that I've gotten a hang of the major game mechanics.

A lot of combat has been automated, you build divisions which consists of up to 4 brigades of any combination of unit you designate, infantry, artillery, tanks etc. Divisions are assigned a leader and for extra logistical and organization bonuses you can assign them an HQ as well. A regular HQ can manage two divisions and you can then add another HQ on top of it which can can manage 3 division HQ's and so on until you have the theater HQ. The more units you have attacking at the same time the higher the organization penalty is, this is directly offset by the theater HQ so its in your interest to assign all fronts to a theater. Bonuses are applied from each HQ to attacking divisions by range (range is determined by your radio tech).

Now this all sounds rather complicated and it did take me a while to get the hang of it. But once you have your HQ chain set up you can tick on the AI. You can choose to give the smaller HQ's objectives and a "stance" that determines if they attack aggresively or aim to hold the line, if you assign an objective inside your territory that HQ will try to defend those provinces or if you assign in the enemy territory they will try to conqour it. You can tell your HQ which direction you prefer them to take (circumventing mountains instead of going straight over them) or let them figure it out themselves. These individual HQ's will try to do their objectives and still gain full benefit from the theater HQ.

You can also just tick on the AI for the theater HQ and it will automaticly assign all HQ's under it to attack or defend basicly leaving the entire front to the AI and let you deal with important stuff like diplomacy, research and making sure they have the right units to get the job done. A theater HQ will automaticly request units it believes are needed to achieve its objective and you can assign him all these units from the production screen with the click of a button and they will automaticly get there when they're built.

Basicly when you start as germany you have two theater HQ's, there's the Werchmart in Berlin that oversee's the blitz on Poland and it will get this done in less then two months if you assign it the blitzkrieg stance. The other HQ is in the Rheinland, the border to France and I found assigning this theater the defensive measure wasn't actually that good. So I opted for attacking stance and gave it defensive objectives and the AI puts up a much more aggressive defence and actively counter attacks and supports the various battles but will never actually attack the french because it doesn't have the manpower to overcome the massive defensive line they have there.

Overall this game is fucking great, I got a lot out of the demo, you can't play around with production since you only have four months and the german unit composition is a bit weird (no artillery brigades for example) but Paradox have really outdone themselves here and the AI actually helps you and is supremely useful, I feel like this is how Master of Orion 3 should have been done.

Man the sprite packs are bullshit, it seems like they wanted to do what Empire: Total War did but without actually giving you a unique unit. The full game is a bit weird, I'm having a hard time figuring out how the AI likes to group armies and theaters. At one point during my war with poland I accidently clicked define theaters and it just put everything under the control of the french border HQ without sub HQ's which meant no bonuses and lots of stacking penalties.

There's a lot of potential for fucking over history too, if you keep influencing Poland from the start (as Germany) they can't join the allies so all you get for invading them is a bunch of threat (which causes tons of other nations to mobilize and join the allies).

Let's get it out of the way first. The game features pretty primitive 3D, blah blah blah. For those interested in an in-depth grand tactical wargame featuring high-level gameplay at the helm of a Napoleonic army, that may not matter. HistWar: Les Grognards is an indie game being made by French designer Jean-Michel Mathé and published by Battlefront (the developers of Combat Mission). Expected in Q3 2009 (end-September?).

The game is being advertised as being "one of the first - if not the first - FPC (First Person commander) game". But what does that actually mean? FPC is one of the game modes (you have a good variety of options re: the amount of realism you want - and you can play it with a bird's eye view scrolling through the map as well) which attempts to recreate the player's role as the Commander-in-Chief in a Napoleonic battle as realistically as possible. Why does it matter? Realism isn't necessarily fun, but it certainly can be in the proper context. The implications of realism in a strategy/tactics game is that the focus of the gameplay would be heavily aimed at decisions that an actual *commander* would have to do. This means not being able to jump in and micromanage every single unit in the battlefield at once, not being able to issue orders and have them carried out instantaneously; limiting game abstraction as much as possible (but again, the balance needs to be such that it isn't detrimental to fun).

So, again, how does this work? The player is the C-in-C, as in the actual person. Your HQ actually moves around the map, situating itself in positions from which to better view the battlefield. There are 3 levels of AI: "Grand-Tactical (GT),Tactical AI and Regimental AI." As the C-in-C, you replace the Grand-Tactical AI. You issue orders to your corps and divisional commanders, who then issue orders to the subordinates (regimental commander --> brigades, and so on). You can also step in and give orders to regiments if that's what you want. How do you issue orders? With couriers, aides de camp - of which you have a finite number of.

Aides de camphttp://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=85171
This feature is the one that has me the most excited. It sounds like a really neat gameplay feature. Could lead to pretty tense scenarios of information warfare. To issue orders to another commander, you take an aide de camp and send him off to the commander. This takes TIME. If you've sent a commander a long way off, it will take a lot of time to carry new orders there, and it will also take a lot of time for info/intel (corps status/strength/morale, enemy and friendly positions) to get back from there. Furthermore, couriers aren't just abstracted. If they get caught by the enemy (eg. there is an actual enemy unit between you and the commander you wanted to send a message to), that message will never get sent, and the enemy will actually get the message/intel that was being sent.

This actually also works in multiplayer - where it may take quite a while for a message sent by one player to reach another. This can make for some pretty tense co-op/adversarial sessions.

So, in summary, aides de camp are how you issue orders, get situational updates on the battle and the fog of war (info for which can be outdated depending on when aides de camp get to you, if they do at all). Furthermore, they require time to carry out their missions, and can also get captured if they run into enemy formations (and thus provide information to the enemy).

Ordershttp://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=83211
The video in that thread shows off how ridiculously easy it is to issue out orders. Now, the graphics may not be pretty, but look at how massive the battlefield actually is. Yet, a few clicks, and you're done issuing orders (including the extent of the frontage - very cool). The bulk of the gameplay lies in the actual decision-making and high-level command, rather than constantly interacting with the interface in order to carry out your plan.

You can give chain orders, telling a corps to march to a certain area then change formation and deploy on a certain line immediately after it has arrived to the area or after a certain delay.

Which only takes a few seconds to order - very very cool.

Now, just because orders are easy to do issue doesn't mean they're easy to carried. Not only does it take time to SEND out your orders by couriers, but it also takes time to carry them out.

New players can start with immediate order transmission (which is like most other startegy games work) whereas true Grognards can play with historical communication times (via rider/messenger for example) that can take up to two hours; organizing an army corps of 40000 men necessitates a little bit of time.

This isn't a battle of clicks-per-minute, nor is a matter of rapid micro or memorizing queues. It is a battle of wits. Using limited information, and limited means through which you can act upon that information - given the amount of time it may take to react upon an enemy's action - you as the C-in-C need to out-plan, out-wit, and predict your opponent's moves. You CAN'T just improvise and queue in new counter-units in your build list. You need to anticipate your opponent, defend your vulnerable areas, set your reserves, and so on - IN ADVANCE.

Doctrine Editor
Want your corps and divisions to act a certain way under certain conditions? Implement it into your doctrine!

This feature, which I have never seen before in any game, is a crucial part of your army making, and overall plan. It specifies what reactions your junior commanders (colonels) will have in specific situations. For example, do you want to allow heavy cavalry to chase down fleeing enemy units? Sure, that might guarantee a destruction of said unit or its capture, but what if while chasing the enemy it encounters stiffer resistance and is itself routed or captured. Do you want to take that risk or do you play it safe?
If a detached unit meets a stronger opponent, do you want it to engage at all cost, engage only if attacked or try to disengage? These and many other parameters will be available for you to customize to your war waging taste.

Order of Battle
So there's no in-game base/unit building. Yet, your army is extremely customization. Your entire Order of Battle can be adjusted to fit your needs.

The game will ship with ten historical battles and their historical OOBs. But for more customized games you can make your own OOB. The OOB editor has such wealth of information that it alone warrants buying the game by any Napoleonic buff. You first have to pick the year of your army, as the percentages of Guard, cavalry and artillery in your army varied historically by the year. This feature will prevent spamming as you cannot abuse a type of units to a historically unrealistic degree. Every historical unit is there to pick for your army (with its custom uniform) with all Marshals, generals, Division and brigade commanders faithfully represented with attributes that would influence to a certain degree how units under their command react.
The customization is so in depth that you can pick how many battalions/squadrons you want for each regiment and for an extra price you may assign it artillery pieces to make it more deadly.
If you do not have time for this tedious but addicting micromanagement of the composition of your army, no problem; just let the software pick a random but balanced OOB for you according to the year and the size that you specified.
Another amazing feature in the OOB is that you can assign a delay for certain corps or individual units before they join the battlefield. This way, you can simulate reinforcements arriving.

Multiplayerhttp://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=85868
8 players. PvP or co-op. Can be split any way. 1 v 7. Players vs AI. Units can be split out any way (eg. one C-in-C, one player controls 2 corps, another 1 corps, or mix-and-match. Units can also be shared between multiple players).
Example of messages in multiplayer:

Screenshots
So why does no one here even know about this game? Because of these!

I'm really excited about this game. Sure, it's low-budget indie, but the gameplay features impress me far beyond that of any conventional RTS. The multiplayer sounds particularly awesome (especially sending couriers between players).

Indie games are all that is keeping me interested these days. Between dwarf fortress and mount & blade I am not really playing AAA titles. Les grognards looks so awesome, and it sounds like its actually going to be released soon. I've been following this game for years, I was sure it was going to turn into vaporware. Its like they scanned my brain for all the things I wanted in a wargame, and then made les grognards.

Les Grognards definitely sounds cool. I think most wargamers overlook bootleg graphics as long as the gameplay is there.

I still haven't played HoI3 yet.. Like all the paradox games there's so much there to intimidate me. The only one of their games that I played a ton of was Crusader Kings and some EU3. I've only dabbled in the HoI games. I'm reading about some bugs/issues with the game that's kinda making me want to hold off until they release 1.2.

Les Grognards looks really really good. I've been watching it for a long while. Is it actually out now? You wouldn't toy with us, right?

About the Paradox games, we should totally do a succession game starting in Rome and ending in HoI. I meant to make a pitch for it during that big sale a while back, but I missed my chance. How about the succession game to end all succession games?

Les Grognards looks really really good. I've been watching it for a long while. Is it actually out now? You wouldn't toy with us, right?

About the Paradox games, we should totally do a succession game starting in Rome and ending in HoI. I meant to make a pitch for it during that big sale a while back, but I missed my chance. How about the succession game to end all succession games?

Are you by chance referring to the mod (is it a mod or was it just a Paradox "patch") that strings together all of Paradox's grand strategy games into one absolutely MASSIVE grand strategy game?

Les Grognards looks really really good. I've been watching it for a long while. Is it actually out now? You wouldn't toy with us, right?

About the Paradox games, we should totally do a succession game starting in Rome and ending in HoI. I meant to make a pitch for it during that big sale a while back, but I missed my chance. How about the succession game to end all succession games?

Are you by chance referring to the mod (is it a mod or was it just a Paradox "patch") that strings together all of Paradox's grand strategy games into one absolutely MASSIVE grand strategy game?

Yeah, apparently it's an official thing that lets you export your save to the next chronological game.

If you are already playing Hearts of Iron II, I suggest you download the World In Flames mod. Really improves the experience. More accurate historical conditions, better combat resolution, and most importantly, a more interesting and varied AI. This is by far it's best feature. You will see a general increase in AI intelligence so it's harder to encircle provinces and form pockets, and you will also start seeing it planning large scale operations in the scale of an Operation Overlord or Downfall.